Titanfall out for Xbox 360

Been too busy to even do a post for our game coming out (on Xbox One and PC) a month ago. Still busy right now with the upcoming patches. But here's a post for the Xbox 360 version, which come out yesterday. It was mostly handled by Bluepoint Games. It's amazing seeing them get our game performing on the 360!

All our Titans

The Atlas, Stryder and Ogre. Here they all are!

Titanfall at GamesCom

We released another Titanfall video on the eve of GamesCom. Tomorrow, the people there in Cologne, Germany will be the first members of the public to play our game - I can't wait!

Titanfall is Revealed

Just a quick post. This is what has been taking my time away from my Dig Dug/Balloon Fight game: Titanfall! I hope you think it was worth it!

No More Free Time!

So my new year resolution to release one thing every month was a failure. It turns out I have even less free time than I thought. I am afraid it will continue to be so with E3 around the corner and my company, Respawn Entertainment, having "something" planned for it. ;-) I will be dedicating my time on that... and it's something exciting!

For the time being, I will just release what I have done so far. The idea was to make a small Dig Dug type of game. Maybe I will finish it at some point in the near future, but I think that is unlikely with my other commitments right now! Anyway, the download even includes the level editor (diged.exe) if you want to mess with that.

Download: dig-release-20130311.zip

... Or you can just watch the video below!

Almost there... !

Not almost there, actually. :) This is just a progress update.

I hooked up XAudio 2 sound support. It's good to hear those tiny, little feet thumping around again. My wife is helping me make some music now. :) The editor is also quite functional. It has undo/redo, you can place and erase tiles, save and load levels... I don't know what else more you would need! I even added support to rotate the camera, using Maya-like controls (alt + mouse button). You can see it in that screenshot below.

I recently finished adding frustum culling for the rendering. Now I plan on looking into sharing that spatial partitioning code with the physics system (right now collision detection is O(n^2)). Once that is done, I think I can start working on the game...

In other news, I finished a real-life Gnomon course for Maya awhile ago. Below is my finished, programmer art and the reference picture it is meant to be based on. Nothing great, but I did learn the basics of using Maya.

It was a pain making the trek down to Hollywood for class. After work. Twice a week. On top of a fairly heavy homework load. But I think it was worth it. It has given me an insight into what real 3D artists do and a greater appreciation for their work. It has also been a great help for my real work (which I still can't talk about). No, I don't make art, but knowing how Maya works helps with debugging.

My 2013 New Year's resolution is to release "something" around the end of each month (whenever the weekend falls, as that's my only free time). So I plan to release a "game" by the end of January. It won't be Battle Balloons, but something else. So that I can actually reach this goal, I have something simpler in mind (but hopefully still pretty cool). I can't wait to reveal it!

Anyway that's it from me... until the next post!

Editor Is Minimally Functional

I've been doing some more Battle Balloons work in the little pieces of spare time I can scavenge.

The editor is minimally functional now, so I can finally start making the actual game. Too bad I foresee even less free-time in the short-term... too many other things happening at the moment (both work and personal)! So this will probably be the last update for awhile. :(

If you want, give it a spin (not sure if it will work, as it's not seen much testing at all). Just download the .exe below and run ballooned.exe for the editor and balloon.exe for the game. By default the game loads the level, data/game/start.level.lua, but you can specify a different one as a command-line argument.

Good luck!

Download: battle_balloons-release-20121005.zip

Native GUI editor and a bit more...

Been awhile since the last update, so here it is...

As usual, I'm busy with real work (at Respawn Entertainment), so Battle Balloons has been put on the back burner. :( But I have been occasionally chipping away at it. So far, the major changes have been:

1. rolling my own 2D physics engine (for multiplayer support later),
2. Direct3D 11 based renderer (OpenGL ES will still be supported too),
3. Lua scripting (also replaces YAML as the serialization format), and
4. a level editor that now uses native GUI controls (only testing with the Win32 C API for now, but I want to support other OS's too).

I really should stop messing around and finish the actual game, but I can't help get distracted with wanting to learn new things. Once this editor is done, I'll get right to it!

P.S. Also, Abbie (the community manager at Respawn) did an interview of me here!

Quad-wielding in slow-motion

Another trailer for The Darkness II came out on GameSpot today, showcasing the quad-wielding mechanic in our game! It reminded me of the first time I showed my mum screenshots of our game. One of her reactions was it was "too cruel" and had too much "terror". I can only imagine what she might think of this latest video below. :) Much love, Mum!

Here's Johnny Powell!

Here's the latest trailer for the game I've been working on for the past two years, The Darkness II. It's the best one yet, IMHO. :) My life lately has been focused on hammering out those final bugs for certification (where we send a build to Microsoft and Sony to approve). We're almost there!

WIP on placeable tiles

Quick video on initial placeable stuff (with snapping) for the level editor. I have been messing around with engine/low-level stuff for such a long time now, it's refreshing to see signs of my game returning again! Left to do is code to merge tile meshes together (no seams) and hooking it up to my barely-tested output serializer.

In unrelated news, my fiance wanted me to make a simple website for our wedding. So I took the opportunity to learn and mess with the Google App Engine and Go programming language. You can go to it here, but there is not much to see, unless you have a Google account that is actually invited. :(

What I can say though is the experience working with the Google App Engine has been pleasant. Quite easy and fast to get things up and running (compared to Java EE).

UPDATE: I put up a newer vid showing actual static boxes being placed! That's pretty much all I could get done with the little spare time I had for the weekend. :(

Scrolly thingy

Nothing special today: just a scrollable list box for selecting types (to place on the level). It has been interesting dabbling in implementing my own UI controls, but I am also happy I will be moving on to actual editor things now!

So apparently Ludum Dare (LD48 for short) is on right now (this weekend). For those not familiar, it is a competition to quickly create games in 48 hours. I have always wanted to participate in one of these, but never seem to be free on the weekends it's on...

Maybe I can show this off at a LD17520. Yep, that's right - according to the revision history, I have been working on Battle Balloons for two years! To be fair, in that time I have also been busy working on releasing BioShock 2 and soon-to-be-released The Darkness II. These commercial titles put the food on the table, so they have always taken priority. :)

Anyway, time to drive to Toronto to visit some buddies for the weekend!

Preliminary level editor work

Decided to do some long-overdue work on Battle Balloons this long weekend. Been beaching it up every single weekend before this, so a weekend indoors is a nice change (along with fattening myself up on the ribfest outside!).

The pieces for the UI toolkit (which run in-game) are beginning to come together. I have a bunch of windows you can drag around and overlap. Font rendering could be better, but this will suffice for now. The editor is going to be super-simple; much like the VVVVVV editor actually (which I have been messing around with). If I ever did want something more, I would probably use a real UI toolkit (maybe QT) rather than write my own.

Anyway, just thought I would report on some Battle Balloony stuff for once, rather than The Darkness II (which is coming along real swell - heaps of polish going in and more to come... it's gonna be awesome!).

One more day to go... let's see what I can cook up!

Basic windows (taken from an OS X build)!

UPDATE: Made a bit more progress today. Mainly just a list box and blinding/folding windows. Video below (from a Windows build this time).

San Diego Comic-Con

If anyone is going to be in San Diego this month for Comic-Con, we have been furiously polishing a playable build of The Darkness II that will be showing there... so please check it out! It will be at booth #2629. There will also be free copies of The Darkness II: Confessions comic and a chance to win a sweet Darkling figurine (pictured above)! Take a look at the 2K blog for more details.

Anyway, hope you enjoy playing our demo! :)

P.S. This was the first weekend in a long time I had to myself. Did a bit more editor work for Battle Balloons. I have the UI framework done and working on the "look" now - aiming for something like that minimalist window manager, Blackbox. Loved using that thing back in my Linux days...

Hard to find an original screenshot, but Blackbox kind of looked like this.

More Darkness II gameplay!

With E3 kicking off with all its awesome announcements and trailers, here's another one from the game I'm working on. It's our very own Sheldon Carter talking about the beginning of The Darkness II... including some quad-wielding action!

UPDATE: I added a few more video's as they trickled in from E3.

First Darkness II Gameplay Trailer

Here's the first glimpse of gameplay for the game I am working on, The Darkness II! We'll be at E3 too, so check it out if you're going!

More The Darkness II Videos

Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA) with OpenGL ES 2 & GLSL

Managed to squeeze most of this in on the weekend, just before flying off to the Cayman Islands for some R & R... :)

The Battle Balloons rendering system now features morphological anti-aliasing (MLAA)! It is an anti-aliasing technique that works by finding vertical & horizontal edges and blending them based on the edge's length and end point conditions. The original paper by Alexander Reshetov explains this in more detail. It includes source code, but is apparently too slow for real-time rendering. God of War III is the first title I know to have taken this technique and optimized it to work in real-time (on the PlayStation 3). Jorge Jimenez and friends later published another real-time approach with DirectX/HLSL (officially called Jimenez's MLAA), which I have based my own OpenGL/GLSL implementation on.

This is actually a distraction I succumbed to while working on the level editor. It still has some bugs to iron out, but soon it will be out of the way and I can return to level editor land!

On a related note, I just found out about Timothy Lottes' FXAA technique yesterday at work. This looks even better, but I think I will hold off on implementing that... for now. Too many other things I need to get on with first.

Without MLAA: Lots of ugly, hard edges.

With MLAA: Hard edges blended/blurred together.

Almost there... !

We're on the final stretch of The Darkness II project and it's coming along quite nicely. It's so cool to read everyone's positive responses to our preview build (Kotaku, Shack News, Twitter, etc.)! Makes me really excited for release day.

On the personal project front of Battle Balloons (no, I have not forgotten about it!), I finally found a bit of time to work on the editor. Still putting together the UI framework/widgets but at least some real progress is being made. Will post something up soon...

For now, enjoy some actual gameplay screenshots of The Darkness II, the game I slave away at during the day. :-) Look out for the cover art on a retail store shelf soon, too!

The Darkness II Announced

What have I been up to at work since releasing BioShock 2? Well, it was just recently announced: The Darkness II! I wish they released more screenshots and information (we've been up to so much!), but I'm just a programmer and not in marketing. :) Keep an eye out for more reveals... I'm super excited!

Go to the dark, JACKIEEEE!~~~

Some BioShock 2 MP

A bit old now, but I love these video's by Almighty360 on BioShock 2 (the latest game I worked on)! So cool seeing someone enjoying (and even frustrated - but I hear ya on all of them!) a game all of us at DE spent so many countless hours working on. :) The video is in a lot of parts, so below are only a few: